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The first year or two in any given country is generally pretty difficult to figure out how US taxes work with them. Once that's done it doesn't become an issue after that.
As for US consular services, one gets all the advantages one gets from having another country as backup when something is going wrong. Unrest in a country you are staying in and people need to be evacuated? The US has done that many times for its citizens in the past. It has helped other countries evacuate their citizens as well, but they generally have given priority to US citizens. Have legal trouble in another country? Having access to people from the embassy of the country with the big military helps. US citizens are in many places treated better as a result.

Yes. They don't lose anything by becoming citizens (there are tax issues but they are pretty minor), and being a US citizen has a lot of advantages, like the support of US consulate services. They can then decide which passport to travel on depending on what is most convenient. And they can then donate to American political causes if they want. On the whole the benefits outweigh the costs, and if it really does become an issue they can renounce citizenship later. However, you and they should talk to a lawyer about this first to make sure there aren't any special issues that might come up in your particular case. When in doubt, always go with real legal help not random people on the internet.

With the disclaimer that I'm not a lawyer, this seems like fair use. In the US there are four major prongs to evaluate fair use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use. The first is purpose, which as Wikipedia summarizes is "The first factor is regarding whether the use in question helps fulfill the intention of copyright law to stimulate creativity for the enrichment of the general public, or whether it aims to only "supersede the objects" of the original for reasons of personal profit. " Since there's no profit here, this does well on the first prong. The second prong isn't very relevant here- it just means that because this is a fictional work, the standard is slightly stricter. The third prong looks at the amount of the original material that has been used. Since only a few names, some colors and certain aspects of costumes were used, the amount used is very small. The fourth factor is whether the material dilutes or competes commercially with the original source material. No one is going to go and not by Power Rangers material or not watch the original because of this. There's clearly no competition or loss of profit to the actual franchise.
Overall, seems like a clearcut case of fair use even before we talk about the parody defense.

The problem isn't simple visits. The problem is twofold: no signs of communication and no signs of substantial change to the surrounding environment. We don't see any Dyson spheres or ringworlds or stellar lifting or any attempts at that all of which would be noticeable. If there are civilizations out there they are ignoring massive amounts of resources. Note also that in the scale of a few billion years travel and colonization isn't that big a deal: galaxies are only around 100,000 light years across so even going at 1% of the speed of light and hopping between stars should lead to galactic colonization within a a few hundred million years at the most.

Possible, but seems unlikely. Every species has that level of hysteria? And what about the species born early enough in the universe's history that they didn't have much reason to worry about the Filter?

While this is really neat, it is yet more of the accumulating evidence that there are no substantial barriers to intelligent life arising or even arising in the early universe. This suggests that something is wiping out civilizations, possibly something the civilizations themselves all do. This problem is known as the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter (Strictly speaking the Filter is whatever makes massive, interstellar, civilizations apparently rare, but it looks like most of the Filter really is at or beyond our rough tech level.) The Great Filter could be nuclear war, or epidemics, or biological warfare, or bad nanotech, or possibly something we haven't even thought of that comes completely out of left field. But the evidence for it is growing. This is scary.

Another fun excerpt: "Secondly, participants were asked “Did you read any books about food and agriculture in the past year?”
Participants were asked to select “Yes”, “No”, or “I don’t know”. Just over 16% of participants stated that they had read a book related to food and agriculture in the past year. About 81% answered “No”, and 3% answered “I don’t know”. Those who answered “Yes” were asked: “What is the title of the most recent book you read about food and agriculture?” The vast majority of responses were of the form “I don’t remember” or “cannot recall”. Fast Food Nation, Food Inc., and Omnivore’s Dilemma were each mentioned about three times. The Farmer’s Almanac and Skinny Bitch were mentioned twice. One respondent mentioned the bible."

This appears to follow the general pattern that people will lie to interviewers to seem more smart, educated, or intellectual than they are. They don't mention in the study a correlation between those who said yes to reading a book and then couldn't "remember" it when pressed and those who wanted to ban food containing DNA, but I'd be willing put money on their being a correlation.

A drug test isn't an assumption of guilt in a court of law. The entire guilty until proven innocent is for criminal and civil trials, not for employment. Mandatory drug tests are pragmatically stupid for many reasons in many industries (they are much less likely to catch the hard drugs like cocaine which go out of the system fast than marijuana which lingers, they cost a lot of money), but in the case of Disney where the employees are working on and maintaining rides with many passengers and where people could easily be killed if something goes wrong, drug tests aren't as unreasonable. In general, the real silliness of drug tests is when they are used by things like fast food restaurants or worse when they are used as a condition of welfare (where the evidence is that they cost far far more than they save the state).

Because why just use soil when there's also all that other easily available material also? Note that even if the AI does use soil, using up all the world's soil would still be pretty unpleasant for humans. The central problem is that the AI has no reason to stop at any amount of resources so why not use everything available?

We are actively trying to make fully sentient AI. Moreover, we have good reason to think it can be done: there's an example of a sentient thing already: humans.
And the real issue isn't that it wants to kill us, but that it can use the matter we're made up of to do something else with. It doesn't hate you: you just happen to be useful atoms.

Issues involving free speech and threats to free speech is both a nerd issue and "news that matters." It also is a tech issue because improvements in communication have allowed people to get worked up all over the globe over things that are happening farther away that they wouldn't know about at all otherwise.

If you genuinely think this then you haven't been paying attention. The primary point of feminism has been historically to put men and women on equal footing and give them equal opportunities. The fields in question, computer science, are actually a case in point: the percentage of females in computer related fields actually used to be higher. It actually dropped with the rise of the personal computer which was advertised as a thing for young boys. See http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding and it still hasn't gotten to the point it was in the 1980s. And when skilled people, of any gender, aren't going to the fields where their skills can be most useful, we all suffer.

Yes, there are some radical feminists who have some very bad ideas or end goals, but that's going to occur in any political movement. Paying attention to outliers is not helpful. If someone had said in 1970 that the movement for racial equality's primary objective was to sabotage white people that would be the exact same sort of thing, and it would have the exact same things wrong with it.

The idea here is interesting but I'm not convinced for three reasons: first, the fact that massive staffs are used to plan out their days isn't necessary great evidence that it really is difficult: that could be administrative bloat. Second, for much of a trip to Mars days will end up looking very much like each other until one is actually on planet. They won't be doing much in the way of experiments on the way to Mars. Third of all, a 20-30 minute delay will not really create that many problems with getting plans from Earth unless one is in some sort of emergency situation.